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A rush of emotion snared her throat.
“Does that make you feel guilty?” she asked. “Joel, none of this changes what you and Sydney had. None of it changes what I had with Curtis.”
“You’re,” he squinted, “close. I’ve never felt like this before, and you know how gone I was over Syd. This is worse. Much worse.”
“And if your feelings are this intense, you’re wondering if you can handle losing us. Am I close?”
“You’re hovering around the bullseye.”
“Joel, you know how this Adrían situation bugs you?Myissue is that I don’t know how to get you to accept that I have zero plans to betray you. I love Sydney. You know I do. But, if I’m being honest, I hate that she hurt you like this. I don’t think she meant to, and she was doing her best with what she knew at the time. Still, it breaks my heart that you had your heart broken this way. I want to put it back together, baby. So much.”
“You are,” he insisted.
“Not if you think I’m thinking of leaving you. Not if you’re comparing my past with Adrían to the future I hope to build with you.”
She brushed a kiss over his lips, and he cupped the back of her head to hold it longer, his fingers disappearing into her hair.
When they separated, he smoothed her brow with his thumb, and it was an incredible thing to be able to see on his face exactly what he felt for her.
“I once went to a psychology conference where one of the speakers shared that they asked a client, ‘If you had a child, would you be proud for them to grow up a mirror image of your spouse?’ Now, this client was in an emotionally abusive relationship, so the speaker was looking for a way to get them to see things from the outside looking in. Joel, there are over a dozen qualities and traits that I could list to explain why I feel about you the way I do. But the one that sticks out is that I would be proud for Theo and Josiah to grow up like you.”
“You would?”
“You know I would. You’re just trying to get me to shower you with more sweet words.”
The side of his mouth lifted. “Eesh, I’m yours. In every way you could imagine.Thinkingabout not having you is enough to drive me crazy, and, shit, it felt like it crept up on me. It’s been in here,” he hovered a hand over his heart, “for a while now, hiding. And I knew, you know? Fuck, I knew it back in Maui, even. I’d fly down, stay for a while, and then when it was time to go back, something would just…” He set his hand on his chest. “It was like a hook. I’d be on the plane, and it would be…agonizing, I guess, is the best word for it. I wanted to go back. The minute I left you, Eesh, I wanted to go back to you.”
She wrung her hands behind his head, needing to busy them to contain the nervous energy moving through her body. This wasn’t the direction she’d seen the conversation heading when she spotted him walking up at the school. She’d been expecting him to shut down.
But he was trying.
Trying for her.
For them.
For their family.
“You’re so much more than my wife, Ayesha,” he continued. “I want you forever, point blank. I want to wake up next to you every morning and call you Mrs. Lattimore until my eyes close for the last time. I want how your body feels when I hold you close to me. Your scent. Your lips. Your voice.” His brows crooked as if he was suddenly struck by a jolt of pain. “I never want to live without the three of you, and I know, without a doubt, you’d fight for me. You’d fight for us. You don’t love me because I’m good to you. You love me because you see something inside me that makes you want to be good to me, too.”
A cry snuck from her throat, followed immediately by another, and another, until she had to press her eyes into his shoulder for his shirt to catch her foolish tears.
“I stopped you because I was scared,” she said. “The day after you found out about Sydney and Kofi, I stopped you from saying you love me because my feelings for you were so…sopowerful.Then, you were still in love with Sydney. I thought for sure you would go back, and I knew how much that would hurt. Joel, for much longer than I was willing to admit, I wanted you to come back to Maui too. Whenever you left, I’d sit at the airport, crying my eyes out, scaring the airport staff.”
He kissed the side of her head. “I was convinced you shut me down because I read our relationship all wrong. And I won’t lie. That shit devastated me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I think we’re good now.”
“Joel,” she sighed, “I had feelings for you inMalibu.”
She felt him go still.
“Tell me what you mean,” he said. “Please.”
“I’d hear you and Sydney at night since her room was right next to mine. The more you went to her, the more lonely I felt. The more salient Curtis’ death felt. For the first time since Curtis died, there was someone I wanted, someone I could see myself with for a long time, but he didn’t want me back.”
He raised her head.
